Thursday, September 15, 2011

Mens sana in corpore sano

Writing in the Atlantic, Taylor Branch (interviewed above) has a hard hitting and informative essay on the history of college athletics in the United States, titled The Shame of College Sports. Here is an excerpt:

For all the outrage, the real scandal is not that students are getting
illegally paid or recruited, it’s that two of the noble principles on
which the NCAA justifies its existence—“amateurism” and the
“student-athlete”—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated
by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young
athletes. The tragedy at the heart of college sports is not that some
college athletes are getting paid, but that more of them are not.

Branch, rightly in my view, compares the evolution of the amateur ideal in the Olympics to college athletics, foreshadowing change coming to the NCAA:

In November 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed the bipartisan
Amateur Sports Act. Amateurism in the Olympics soon dissolved—and the
world did not end. Athletes, granted a 20 percent voting stake on every
Olympic sport’s governing body, tipped balances in the United States and
then inexorably around the world. First in marathon races, then in
tennis tournaments, players soon were allowed to accept prize money and
keep their Olympic eligibility. Athletes profited from sponsorships and
endorsements. The International Olympic Committee expunged the word amateur
from its charter in 1986. Olympic officials, who had once disdained the
NCAA for offering scholarships in exchange for athletic performance,
came to welcome millionaire athletes from every quarter, while the NCAA
still refused to let the pro Olympian Michael Phelps swim for his
college team at Michigan.

This sweeping shift left the Olympic reputation intact, and perhaps
improved. Only hardened romantics mourned the amateur code. “Hey, come
on,” said Anne Audain, a track-and-field star who once held the world
record for the 5,000 meters. “It’s like losing your virginity. You’re a
little misty for awhile, but then you realize, Wow, there’s a whole new
world out there!”

Without logic or practicality or fairness to support amateurism, the
NCAA’s final retreat is to sentiment. The Knight Commission endorsed its
heartfelt cry that to pay college athletes would be “an unacceptable
surrender to despair.” Many of the people I spoke with while reporting
this article felt the same way. “I don’t want to pay college players,”
said Wade Smith, a tough criminal lawyer and former star running back at
North Carolina. “I just don’t want to do it. We’d lose something
precious.”

“Scholarship athletes are already paid,” declared the Knight
Commission members, “in the most meaningful way poss-ible: with a free
education.” This evasion by prominent educators severed my last
reluctant, emotional tie with imposed amateurism. I found it worse than
self-serving. It echoes masters who once claimed that heavenly salvation
would outweigh earthly injustice to slaves. In the era when our college
sports first arose, colonial powers were turning the whole world upside
down to define their own interests as all-inclusive and benevolent.
Just so, the NCAA calls it heinous exploitation to pay college athletes a
fair portion of what they earn.

As it turns out, my own views are not so far off from those expressed by Branch.

1 comment:

After a week during which I've seen both the LSU Tigers in Baton Rouge and the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, I have to ask if you really feel the comparison between college athletes and slaves is necessary or justified.

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This blog is my professional notebook for commentary and analysis related to sports in society. My main interests are in the governance of international football (soccer), the governance of college athletics and sport as a laboratory for social science research.

In case you are curious I support Arsenal and St. Pauli, and of course, the mighty Colorado Buffaloes.